Using visualization and exploration tools can be of
great use for the understanding of a software system
when only its source code is available. However,
understanding a large software system by visualizing
only its lower level artifacts (e.g., classes,
methods) and the relations between them does not
scale for industrial-size systems. To address the
scalability issue, higher level hierarchical
abstractions (e.g., package structure, clustered
decompositions of the system) should be used
together with relations between them that are
usually aggregated from the lower level relations.
In this paper, we present the concepts behind
Softwarenaut, a tool aimed at exploring any kind of
hierarchical decompositions of a system, and then we
look at a specific exploration of a system. In the
experiment, the hierarchical decomposition of the
system is the result of applying a semantical
clustering to group classes that use similar terms.